Sharon J. Goldwater is an American and British

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, cognitive scientist, developmental linguist, and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

researcher who holds the Personal Chair of Computational Language Learning in the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

School of Informatics. Her research involves the

unsupervised learning Unsupervised learning is a type of algorithm that learns patterns from untagged data. The hope is that through mimicry, which is an important mode of learning in people, the machine is forced to build a concise representation of its world and t ...

of language by computers, and computer modeling of language development in children.

Education and career

Goldwater is a 1998 graduate of

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

, and worked as a researcher at

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic d ...

from 1998 to 2000. She then returned to Brown for graduate study in cognitive and linguistic sciences, completing her Ph.D. in 2006. Her dissertation, ''Nonparametric Bayesian Models of Lexical Acquisition'', was supervised by Mark Johnson. After postdoctoral research at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, she took her present position at the University of Edinburgh. She was given a personal chair in 2018.

Recognition

Goldwater was the 2016 winner of the

Roger Needham Award The Roger Needham award is a prize given scientists who are recognised for important contributions made to computer science research The British Computer Society established an annual Roger Needham Award in honour of Roger Needham in 2004. It is a � ...

of the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Goldwater, Sharon Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists British computer scientists British women computer scientists Linguists from the United States Linguists from the United Kingdom Women linguists Natural language processing researchers Brown University alumni Academics of the University of Edinburgh